Child Called It Author’s Purpose


When Writing A Child Called It, author Dave Pelzer intended to show child abuse from the eyes of a child to help people better understand why abused children experience problems socially, and just to raise awerness for the huge problem that is very much present in America.
Most of the time when we hear about child abuse, we don’t get much detail on what happened. Many would think that this is because the truth is to graphic, but in my opinion, to really understand how evil something is, you must see it at its worst. Recently in history we learned about Gandhi, something that helped his gain support was the press coverage of brutality from the British Empire against Indians. I believe this is a tactic that Pelzer uses to get support for his cause. Now, a child’s point of view may be very biased when it comes to child abuse, but at the same time, the child is the victim, and it is his view that matters. This is a reason that parents and guardians must be extremely careful because something small can cause a lot of damage on kid. Reading o hearing about Child abuse in the media does not give you an idea of how an event really happened. It may tell you, but a child called it shows you. If we hear, “A ten year old was forced to drink cleaning materials.” Our minds wanting to shelter us will fill in the blanks to make the situation not as bad as it really was. However, if we were to hear “Mother rammed the cold spoon deep into my throat… a moment later I couldn’t breath. My throat seized. I stood wobbling in front of mother, feeling as if my eyes were going to pop out of my skull,” We would see the event as what it really is. It went from a kid force to eat something that tastes bad, to a near death experience. After reading the first half of A Child Called It, almost everything I had thought previously about Child abuse changed.